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Published: March 28th 2007
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Well the first entry on our travel blog. This one is being written in retrospect from Mexico City as the internet connections in Cuba were very bad, very expensive and very censored (whitepages.co.nz will be pleased to know that it is an anti revolutionary site). It is hard to write this from Mexico as it feels like we have arrived back from a period of time in an alternative reality. Cuba has to be the strangest place I have ever been to. It is difficult to summarise and describe at all as it was a totally unique experience (I suspect if the Cuban Ministry of the Interior read this blog it will be a once in a lifetime experience).
We spent about 5 days in Havana when we arrived, staying initially in the Hotel Inglaterra, a testament to the former colonial glory of Havana Hotels. It did have an excellent bar however that we drank many mojitos at (actually I think I can say that about most places we visited). Like many of the places that we visited in Havana, the Inglaterra was described by Graham Greene in “Our Man in Havana” which we read when we were there.
In some ways very little seems to have changed since he wrote the book in the pre revolution 1950s, including the Cuban fascination with sex, alcohol and sausage dogs.
The Cuban Revolution occurred in 1960 but it is a living reality of the lives of Cuban people, through the restrictions on certain activities and enterprise ( there almost no private businesses and no private internet is permitted in Cuba), the ongoing food rations, the massive billboards everywhere exhorting such things as “Socialism or Death” (there is absolutely no advertising anywhere so all you see are these billboards), the quotes everywhere from Fidel Castro and other revolutionary heroes, and the bizarre idealisation of Che Guevara (who was basically an ideological mercenary as far as I can work out. I do have to confess though due to the lack of any shopping in Cuba I did develop an obsession with Che postcards, specifically finding the most unflattering or bizarre ones I could - some of you may have received the results of this obsession).
One of the best things about Cuba was staying in what are know as “Casas Particulares”, these involve people renting out rooms in their houses to
Capitolio Building, Havana
Does this remind you of anywhere? tourists. We met some lovely people and had some very interesting, if guarded, discussions with them. If we hadn’t stayed in the casas I would have felt like we had not talked to anyone “normal” or had any understanding of what life is like in Cuba, in terms of incomes, rationing, state controlled TV, newspapers etc.
There is a very strange economic system in Cuba. There are 2 currencies, the one that tourists use is called Convertible Pesos, and each Convertible Peso is worth 25 times that of the “normal” peso that Cubans use and get paid in. So there will be one peso price quoted on item, but tourists will pay 25 times that of locals. Locals are desperate to get their hands on the convertible pesos to top up their meagre incomes (they earn the equivalent of 12 convertible pesos a month which is about 25 NZ Dollars). However because the state does not allow enterprise of almost any kind there are some truly bizarre innovations to extract money from tourists. As well as the normal overcharging of tourists these include roping off sections of museums so that the “guards” can take you through them for a
small tip, people charging for photos of themselves and people charging for photos of their dressed up sausage dogs.
During our time in Cuba we tried to travel by as many modes of transport as possible. We ended up using buses, a ferry (this was a very odd experience, as we were all thoroughly searched before we were allowed aboard this complete rust bucket of a ferry in Havana harbour, we subsequently learned this was because there have been 2 hijacking attempts to take this boat to Florida, one of which was successful- the Americans subsequently returned the ferry to Cuba), steam train, normal train (despite everyone telling us not to use the train it was not bad apart from the truly foul toilets; the train needed to be going above 30km/hour in order to dissipate the smell from the carriage), old American cars ( a particular highlights was one driver who had a leg in a cast), horse and cart (our thanks to Joline the horse who saved us from spending a night at the Matanzas train station), and bicycle taxi (for me when I had sprained my ankle).
No discussion of Cuba would be complete with
Jazz Band, Plaza Vieja, Havana
You could not move without bumping into a jazz group. out mentioning the food, drink and cigars. The food was dire. It was bland, repetitive and it was hard to muster up much enthusiasm for eating. Almost the only variation was in the amount of the monthly salt ration that was used in each meal - the Cuban salt ration is 2kg a month and sometimes it felt like we were getting it all in one hit. This holiday has made me realise what a deeply shallow person I am, as I spent most of the time in Cuba fantasising about the food we would be able to eat when we got back to Mexico. On the positive side the mojitos were good (and cheap) and we consumed a large number of them over the 2 weeks we were there, and there are a number of very silly photos to prove this. In terms of the cigars, being public health people Sarah and I cannot confirm or deny whether we inhaled, however Keith did develop quite a fondness for them, mainly as a sophisticated accessory I think.
For those of you interested in geography we visited Havana, Trinidad (this was lovely and relaxed, although I did sprain my ankle
on the cobbles there), Santa Clara (to visit the Che Guevara shrine- I am not kidding about it being a shrine), Matanzas (to try and catch a train called Hershey, alas we were unsuccessful), Havana again and Vinales (to complete our entire Cuban tobacco sequence from growing, to processing and smoking).
We will tell you a little more about these in subsequent entries…..
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Duncan
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Yah
Yah for you guys, looking forward to subsequent installments!